Tip of the Week: Design Better Surveys with Collaboration

Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.

- Henry Ford

Click To Tweet This!

Setting up a survey is not just a one person job, and the best surveys are a work of collaboration. People are always disappointed when they see low response rates to a survey they whip up and send out to their database in ten minutes. Truth be told, surveys are scientific. Often people sending out a survey have no control of the sample size and poor wording in the questions. There are many crucial details that someone writing or designing a survey can often overlook. What may look as well explained and clear intentions for people to complete your survey in your eyes may not make any sense to your target audience of respondents. From the font, layout, length, consistency, wording, order of questions and the number of answers to choose from - optimizing your survey for best results alone is unrealistic.

After creating a draft of your survey, you can easily send a link on to your peers or even your boss to carefully review the survey before it is published. This simple process takes out the having to gather people around your screen or making sure that everyone can login to view the survey properly. Survey Analytics offers a unique draft and collaboration survey mode where your peers can review and provide comments on a per question basis. On top of this - everyone that has the survey link while it is in draft and collaboration mode can see the feedback and responses from others reviewing it in real time. Your collaborators of choice can give you survey feedback, and also directly edit mistakes such as spelling errors on the survey while you are taking it. All changes made to the survey are audited so you can double check the corrections made by your peers.

The next time you are programming a survey, try out draft and collaborate mode to correct mistakes and optimize your survey for best results. Pull your strengths together and exceed your feedback targets - isn't that why we send surveys in the first place? Here's how you can take advantage of draft and collaboration mode to design better surveys. In your Survey Analytics account (New User? Try it for Free Here) - after you have reviewed and are ready to send your survey draft for feedback, simply change the survey status to draft/collaborate mode. From here, enter one e-mail address per line to add reviewers to your survey draft. When you are finished, simply click update survey status. See the picture below for where to find the survey status and how to easily change it. All notes while drafting the survey will be removed after turning it back to active so you can deliver your survey for live responses.